A changing of the guard at Masterpiece; Saatchi’s still got it

There has been hot competition for vacant stands at Masterpiece, London’s swankiest summer season fair. In the course of normal turnover for a young fair, a clutch of antiques and modern art dealers have made way for 26 new exhibitors giving some indication of how the fair’s character is evolving.

In antiquities, David Aaron will focus on Islamic works of art, while Asian art dealer John Berwald will mix oriental grace with modern British art. Old Master dealers De Jonckheere, Derek Johns and Sarto will add gravitas to the mix.

“The fair will reflect the market of today,” says chairman Philip Hewat-Jaboor, with additional galleries showing modern and contemporary art; notably Kalman Maklary from Budapest and Paul Kasmin from New York.

Modern Decorative Arts are boosted with galleries Chastel Marechal and Mathivet from Paris. Photography has a greater presence with specialist dealers Peter Fetterman, and Bernheimer from Switzerland whose 1940 vintage print of Lisa with Turban by Horst P Horst ($120,000 / £97,000) epitomises the glamour of the fair.

Saatchi shows he’s still got it with £400,000 sale

“Handpicked” was the name given to a selection of 50 works from the Saatchi Gallery collection that were sold at Christie’s in South Kensington to support the gallery’s free entrance policy and education programmes. If they had been picked for today’s re-sale market, the choice was astute as all but seven works sold for just under £400,000 which was at the high end of the pre-sale estimate, demonstrating that Saatchi has not lost his touch.

A painting by Turner prize nominee Lynette Yiadom-Boakye, bought in the low thousands of pounds in 2005 when she was unknown, sold for £39,000. A manic portrait by the Ivorian artist Aboudia, bought in 2014 for about £4,000, sold to an internet bidder in Japan for £20,000 – an auction record.

Even artists who had never sold at auction before did well. Glaswegian pair Littlewhitehead’s life-size sculpture of a group of hoodies, It Happened in the Corner, cost around £6,000 at the New Contemporaries exhibition in 2008, and sold for £27,500.

A new record for a South African art sale

Irma Stern, Young ArabCredit:
Strauss & Co

In Cape Town, auctioneer Strauss & Co has just delivered a national record total £4.6 million a South African art sale. Top price was R13.6 million (£754,000) for a painting of a young Arab by Irma Stern. Although there were no individual records, 89 per cent of lots were sold.

The record however, does not surpass Bonhams’ £7.5 million London sale in 2011 when it sold Irma Stern’s Arab Priest for £2.7 million. The house’s sale this week carries a more modest £1 million to £1.5 million estimate. “There aren’t so many big Irma Sterns coming onto the market now,” says Giles Peppiatt of Bonhams.

He does, however, have some big sculptures by 60-year-old Willie Bester, a star of the British Museum’s recent Art from South Africa exhibition. Of the 14 works by Bester entitled Apartheid Laboratory, nine are highly politicised assemblages from found objects, estimated between £7,000 and £18,000 each, which are too large to travel but have been viewable in Detroit as part of the respected Gilbert and Lilla Silverman collection.